


Still Life Under Lamplight

by wickersnap



Series: painting with your fingers [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Hogwarts Fourth Year, Kissing, Ron is a huge sap and I adore him, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, it's still a long road and it's like three years early
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:01:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wickersnap/pseuds/wickersnap
Summary: She wonders whether he noticed before and didn’t tell her, whether he touched her while she was petrified in her infirmary bed or if he’d seen glimpses when they’d tumbled after Harry through those ridiculous puzzle chambers in first year. It doesn’t matter, though. Not really. Not when he’s hers.Under the lamplight their hands look like they’ve been soaked in gold.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, background Fred Weasley/Harry Potter/George Weasley
Series: painting with your fingers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1748005
Comments: 12
Kudos: 117





	Still Life Under Lamplight

**Author's Note:**

> I managed to actually hurt myself thinking about how cute these two are this morning, so here is some more soulmate au (with a tentative implication of a third part following Harry and the twins... maybe...)

They’re in their third year by the time they finally notice it. It makes Hermione wonder, afterwards, whether Ron had realised and hadn’t told her, if he’d touched her while she’d been petrified in the infirmary, or if he’d seen glimpses when they’d tumbled after Harry through those ridiculous puzzle chambers in first year. It doesn’t really matter, she decides, remembering when she had stumbled on the marble staircase one morning and he had reached out to steady her by the arm.

They both freeze, in her memory, as Ron’s hand slips over her wrist and leaves a trail of bright, shining bronze against her dark skin.

Bronze: a shimmer of longing and a richness of loyalty, all rolled into one.

Ron turns his palm over to see it covered in that same gorgeous bronze, as if someone has taken a makeup palette to him.

They don’t talk about it, not even when Harry grins and congratulates them.

Hagrid’s first Care of Magical Creatures lesson introduces them to hippogriffs. Everyone backs away when Hagrid asks for a volunteer, and Harry’s too naive and distracted to notice. Ron gives him a little shove forwards before scampering back to Hermione’s side, and Hagrid booms with laughter. Harry doesn’t look too miffed, but he certainly looks nervous to approach the huge beast.

Buckbeak squawks and tilts his head, shuffling uncertainly as Harry bows. Hermione gasps and grabs hold of Ron’s arm without thinking, fingers digging into his wrist in fear. She realises he’s looking at her stupidly, confused and surprised, and she drops him as quickly as if his skin burns. She glances down, despite her apprehension over Hagrid’s teaching methods, and spies more streaks of bronze lancing around Ron’s wrist.

She knows, logically, that her hand does not feel any different, but she can’t seem to convince her brain that a thousand tiny ants are not currently marching across it.

After that, she notices his staring. He watches her constantly whenever he’s not preoccupied with Harry; across the table at lunch and dinner, in between words in his essays, from the sofas in the common room in the late evenings and racing down the grounds to Hagrid’s or the quidditch pitch. He always wears a small, soft smile on his face when he does, and he always looks quickly away when he thinks she’s looking back.

She thinks she might not mind.

She sticks her wand under Malfoy’s nose and punches him in the face. Ron gapes at her openly then, and she feels like she might burst from the nerves and the thrill.

Hours later, Ron stumbles across a room on a shredded, broken leg and stands between Harry and Hermione and Azkaban escapee Sirius Black. He says they’ll have to kill him first, and Hermione almost screams at the thought.

She crouches next to him, out of reach of the Whomping Willow, while Lupin levitates Snape and Wormtail out of the passage. 

“It hurts a lot,” he says bravely, clutching the grass beneath his hands in a deadly grip. “They might even have to… You know… Chop it.”

“I’m sure Madam Pomfrey will find a way to fix it first,” she tells him. Ron losing his leg at fourteen to protect them is worse than bears thinking about, at that moment, and so she refuses. She also knows, somewhere under all of her fear, that he’s being dramatic for attention and sympathy. Unfortunately, she’s a sucker enough to give it to him.

He deserves it, she argues, though they still don’t mention the swirling bronze she sweeps across his cheek and down his arm.

August arrives and Viktor Krum gets the snitch but loses the game, and everyone’s dizzy with celebration.

“Think you’re in love, Ron?” Ginny teases. The twins circle him making horrible impressions of Krum, and Charlie and Harry start up a new song.

“When we’re apart,” Hermione sings with them, “my heart beats only for you.”

The wireless is on full volume as they build up a collection of butterbeer bottles and empty sweet packets. Hermione, giggling and just on the right side of tipsy, grabs Ron’s hand and twirls him in a jaunty, graceless, haphazard dance. He grins and sings terribly out of tune as he follows her, spinning them both under their joined arms and almost pulling them down on their arses. Under the lamplight their hands look like they’ve been soaked in gold. His eyes never leave hers while she holds him (loosely, at arms length). Not once.

After their fourth Halloween at Hogwarts, Hermione berates Ron just as harshly as the twins do for abandoning Harry. They’re still soulmates themselves, with the brilliant grass green they smear across each other’s skin, but Ron is being too stubborn to remedy his mistake. Under her glaring he slinks off to the dormitory to apologise, returning half an hour later with a wide grin and green palms and a handprint on his cheek.

“Did he hit you?” Hermione asks, somewhat surprised. 

“No,” Ron snorts. “Said he was checking for dark magic, confundus charms, the like.”

He gives her a quick side hug and trots back to the dormitory door when Harry appears, all too eager to make up now that they’re talking again. 

Hermione smiles. The twins wink at her from across the room, and she laughs.

Against all better judgement, she lets Krum take her to the Yule Ball.

Ron asks too late, she’s already agreed, and he says it in such a backhanded manner that she slams her book shut and hisses at him in anger. She’s fairly certain that he’d only been trying to hide his nerves and protect his fragile pride, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

She sniffs when he grumbles to his brothers and laughs when they both immediately pick up dates right in front of him.

(Harry is too flustered to really notice Ron’s distress, especially when George smiles just so and ruffles his hair. Hermione thinks it’s hilarious that Ron hasn’t considered an outcome like this, seeing as they’re  _ soulmates). _

Hermione doesn’t mind so much that everyone stares at her as if she’s grown another head when she walks into the hall on Krum’s arm. She smiles with mean satisfaction and ignores Ron just as surely as he ignores her until they’re off the dance floor and Harry’s coming over to congratulate her.

“You’re fraternising with the enemy!” Ron accuses of her, looking sour.

“The  _ enemy!” _ she repeats. “Ronald Weasley, how  _ dare _ you!”

Fred and George step in and let her calm down enough to rejoin Viktor and actually attempt to enjoy the rest of her evening, and she’s grateful. She does have fun, she really does, but she can’t lie to herself and say she wouldn’t rather have Ron holding her close than this grown man she barely knows. She can’t blame Ron for snapping when she herself snapped right back, and she’s no better than he is, stringing poor Viktor along to get back at her—her  _ soulmate _ for being such a prat.

“Go,” Viktor says kindly, before the end of the night. “Go, find your Weasley. You cannot lose him.”

“Viktor,” she breathes, gazing up at his smile and feeling torn to pieces.

“Thank you for this night, Hermioh-nee,” he says, and kisses her hand.

“Thank you,” she says, and kisses his cheek before she hurries off into the Entrance Hall.

“Where have  _ you _ been, then?” Ron mutters, sulking at the bottom of the marble staircase. Harry is nowhere to be seen. “Off canoodling with  _ Viktor, _ have you?”

_ “Ron!” _ she says. “Ron, how—how—! You complete  _ arse!” _

“Oh yeah?” he grumbles, lip curled and eyes everywhere but her face.

“Well—next time,” she says, choking back tears, “next time you know to pluck up the courage and ask me  _ first, _ before  _ someone else _ does!”

His gaze snaps up to hers as he flounders.

“Well that’s—that’s not—I mean, you’re not… I think you’ve missed the point!”

“Have I?” she demands, stepping up so she’s toe-to-toe with him. “Have I, really?”

And maybe it’s because there are so few people around or maybe it’s because Harry isn’t here, or maybe it’s just the lost, pained, pitiful look on Ron’s face, but she grabs his collar and yanks him down to kiss him right there and then in the middle of the hall.

He freezes again, like they did that morning last September on these very stairs, and in a miraculous few seconds melts right back to life. His hands fly to the small of her back and the side of her neck, tugging her into his body and holding her so carefully she thinks she might break. She makes a small noise into his mouth and he licks over the seam of her lips. She’s all too willing to open up for him, anger fizzling away like flat lemonade when the heat of his lips closing around hers is making her completely lose her mind.

He leans back after a long, long few minutes and she gasps for breath, eyes unfocused as she tries to swallow and can’t quite make it past the knot of shock in her throat. She takes his hand and steps to the side, starting up the staircase without looking back. Her fingers curl into the warm, soft meat of his palm, and his curl around hers. She wonders what she looks like, covered in swathes of colour from his touch. She doesn’t look at him all the way back to the Tower and even then can’t quite look up enough to wish him a proper goodnight.

“Wait, Hermione—” he stutters, but she’s already through the dormitory door and halfway up the stairs.

They’re covered, nose to cheek to lips to hands, in great, rich swipes of bronze, each of which is laced with a delicate, pale pink.

It’s a dusting of true love, a unique love for only them.

They still do nothing about it.

Ron barely looks at her the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. She thinks she’s ruined it, messed up the order and tipped them off kilter. She worries her nails until she tears the skin and watches blood well in all of the crevices, and then she catches him staring the way he always does, slack jawed and dazed and utterly adorable.

They’re in the library with Harry, sifting desperately through every book that mentions water for a possible solution when she looks up and catches him. He goes red to the tips of his ears, and it’s adorable. She smiles and goes to find the next book, heart fluttering.

Fred and George come and take them to McGonagall’s office, ruffling Harry’s hair and dropping the lightest of kisses on the top of his head as they go by. Professor McGonagall explains the task with evident reluctance and hands over the potions that will keep them alive while they’re under.

Hermione thinks it’s terribly unfair to everyone involved for her to be chosen, especially when she uncorks the phial and holds it to her lips only to feel Ron’s fingers tangle with hers the moment she knocks it back. She looks over at him in all of his courage and red hair and freckles and with his own empty phial—the last sight the terrified part of her mind worries she will ever see—as they collapse on the spot, hands clutched tightly together.

Hermione breaks the surface first, trailing after Viktor’s badly half-transfigured body. She sees Cedric, Fleur and Cho on the jetty, wrapped in towels, but she can’t find Harry or Ron  _ anywhere. _

“He was waiting for all of us to claim our people,” Viktor tells her. “He should return soon.”

He does, throwing Ron and Fleur’s little sister towards the shore. Ron helps propel the struggling girl forwards and stumbles up onto dry ground, folding forward into Hermione’s arms when she opens her towel to him.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispers, feeling Madam Pomfrey wrap them up in more towels.

“So am I,” he murmurs, and his hands soothe down the back of her sodden robes when he pulls her in underneath his chin.

They might me jumbling through this, might be ambling their dizzying path more surely than ever, but they still can’t bring themselves to upset the balance—not with Harry so vulnerable and hunted, even if he has his other soulmates to console him.

It feels like they’ve suffered through everything already by the time the third task comes around. Dozens of Rita Skeeter’s worst accusations and a large portion of the school turning their backs, fights and screaming matches and emotional turmoil, but when Harry reappears on the lawns hunched over the body of Cedric Diggory, none of them know how to react.

Fred paces anxiously outside the hospital wing while George sits curled on the floor, waiting beside Ron and Hermione and Bill and Mrs Weasley. He stops every so often to murmur a couple of words to his brother, none that any of them can hear, and no one can seem to pull their gaze out of the middle distance.

Harry’s listless, broken daze puts a stop to all of their hopes that they’d misheard, that they’d dreamt it in a fit of nerves. Everything goes on hold and no one wants to discuss anything of particular importance. No one mentions the silver threading itself through the midnight blue wherever the twins touch Harry, and no one looks twice at Ron’s arms around Hermione as she sobs quietly into his shoulder.

They find themselves moving into Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place while Harry’s stuck with the Dursleys, as wall-kickingly frustrating as it is. They aren’t allowed to tell him  _ anything, _ though Hermione’s certain the twins are working quickly to get around it, and the adults won’t tell them any of what’s happening outside their front door.

They’re trapped together in this large, empty, mostly cursed house, and still they don’t do anything. It might feel wrong when Harry’s around but they quickly find out it’s worse when he isn’t, and they’re going spare waiting for something—anything—to happen, so they end up with little time to think of themselves. It’s the wrong time, anyway, Hermione tells herself. It would just be weird.

And then school arrives, and they really do have bigger things to worry about.

That is, until Hermione says, off-handedly one night, “It’s exciting, isn’t it? Breaking the rules.”

Ron gawks at her for a moment, jaw dropping in that silly way it usually does as his blue eyes sparkle with amusement and he leans in without really noticing he’s doing it.

“Who are you and what have you done with Hermione Granger?” he asks, mouth stretching into a wide grin. His hand slips from the back of the sofa down onto her shoulder, and from there it trails all the way along her back to her waist, torturously slowly and absolutely perfect. 

Hermione shivers, her breaths coming more quickly and shallowly by the second, and she can hear her heart beating loudly in her ears. She’s transfixed by Ron’s gaze, completely unable to escape from the heady, all-encompassing attention focused entirely on her. He doesn’t even notice what he’s doing to her, but this time when she reaches out he reaches  _ back _ and they’re pulling each other closer, closer, impossibly  _ closer, _ and it feels like nothing they’ve ever done before. She’s kissing Ron on a sofa in the middle of their common room, where anyone could walk in at any moment, where they’re waiting for  _ Harry, _ and nothing’s ever felt more  _ right. _

Her lips move hungrily against his, and he takes it, gives her what she wants and more, pulling her into his lap and burying his hands in her hair.

“Are we going to pretend this one didn’t happen either?” she murmurs, too terrified to open her eyes.

“Hermione,” Ron breathes against her cheek, “if you don’t think all of this has been driving me round the bend, I’m afraid you’ve finally lost it.”

“God,” she whispers, “please, Ron, tell me I’m not dreaming _.” _

“Go out with me, Hermione,” he says instead, kissing along the length of her neck.

“Yes,” she replies, eyelashes fluttering open. “Yes, of course.”

He laughs and she ducks her face into his neck, hiding in his soft jumper and softer skin and even softer warmth.

“God, you’re gorgeous,” he murmurs, as if he isn’t the one shining with bronze and glowing where the firelight catches the spots of pink, tilting her head up to find her lips. She laughs into his mouth and has to pull away to breathe, blushing darkly when she spots Harry creeping through the portrait over Ron’s shoulder. The twins are just behind him, looking innocently up at the ceiling and doing a bad job of not laughing.

It’s after they disappear up to the dorms that she looks back down at Ron, happy beyond belief. He’s smiling so softly up at her that she giggles and reaches into his hair to reel him back in, and they don’t return to their beds for a long while after. Lavender and Parvati eye the colours she’s sure to be absolutely covered in, but for once don’t have anything to say. When they wake up and head down to breakfast the next morning, Ron takes her hand and doesn’t let go when people start to stare. Instead he shuffles closer, sliding another slice of toast onto her stack.

She smiles down at her plate and squeezes his fingers. She laughs when he squeezes hers right back. For the first time ever, Hermione feels settled right down to her very core.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr!](https://silverxsakura.tumblr.com/)


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